The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the Coen Brothers’ homage to the Western genre; it’s an anthology with SIX of their darkly funny stories. They clearly share Mark Twain’s cynically wry take on human nature, which they depict in Western situations of wagon trains, stagecoach rides, prospecting and hangings. The Coen brothers are not just making fun of Western clichés but also celebrating the genre, with beautiful vistas of New Mexico’s harshness and the spectacular Colorado high country.
The funniest is the opening vignette, with its over-the-top send up of Western conventions – white and black hats, saloon gambling, super fast gunplay and the rest, including nods to the “loquacious Western” subgenre. And it cements Tim Blake Nelson as having the funniest shit-eating grin in cinema.
The best performance is Harry Melling’s in the Meal Ticket segment. Melling is best known as Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursling. He plays an itinerant performer who only speaks during his performances; Melling is startlingly brilliant in those performances and even better when he silently and fatalistically regards his competition.
Harry Melling in THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS
By far the best story is the saddest, The Gal Who Got Rattled, about a sad-eyed young woman (Zoe Kazan) who is following her delusional brother west, to what we all know will be heartbreak. Untethered by her obligation to the brother, she gets the Old West’s opportunity to remake her destiny until the Old West’s cruel chance intervenes.
The movie peters out in the ghostly last story, The Mortal Remains, despite Saul Rubinek’s delicious portrayal of a Frenchman in the Old West.
I don’t recommend The Ballad of Buster Scruggs for general audiences, but Westernphiles and fans of the Coen Brothers dark, dark humor will find it worthwhile viewing; it doesn’t rise anywhere near the level of the Coen’s best: Blood Simple, Fargo, A Simple Man, No Country for Old Men or True Grit. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is playing in a few theaters and streaming from Netflix.
Donna Reed and James Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Every Christmas Eve, the Stanford Theatre presents Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen. It’s a great retro experience to see any film in an elegantly restored movie palace (balcony and all), especially with a Mighty Wurlitzer Organ pre-concert. But sharing the laughs and tears of It’s a Wonderful Life with a large (I’m guessing about 750 seats), sell-out audience is very rich indeed.
The tickets are an egalitarian ten bucks or so, but you must be invested in the experience – you can only buy tickets IN PERSON at the Stanford Theatre box office. The tickets go on sale with little fanfare in the first week of December and quickly sell out. So you have to watch the Stanford Theatre’s website for the start of ticket sales and show up to buy tickets weeks ahead of time. The unforgettable experience is worth it.
This year, advance tickets go on sale Friday, December 14 at 5:00 PM. The Wife and I will be lined up at 4:30.
Ando Sakura, Matsuoka Mayu, Sasaki Miyu, Jyo Kairi and Lily Franky in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
OUT NOW
Romais an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Will win multiple Oscars.
Shoplifters won the Palm d’Or at Cannes. This is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems.
The masterful documentary Monrovia, Indiana is a fascinating movie about a boring subject.
The Great Buster: A Celebrationis Peter Bogdanovich’s biodoc of the comic genius Buster Keaton, filling in what we need to know of Keaton’s life and body of work.
Just in case you haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet – Lady Gaga illuminates Bradley Cooper’s triumphant A Star Is Born. Don’t bring a hankie – bring a whole friggin’ box of Kleenex.
What They Had is an authentic and well-crafted dramatic four-hander with Hilary Swank, Michael Shannon, Blythe Danner and Robert Forster.
The Outlaw King, with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, exists for those who need a dose of medieval slaughter and a spunky queen, but there’s not enough there for the rest of us.
Skip First Man – a boring movie about a fascinating subject.
ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the 1977 neo-noir The American Friend, featuring Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase. The American Friend can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
ON TV
On December 5, Turner Classic Movies will air one of my Overlooked Noir, Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1956). A zillionaire dies and leaves his media empire to his feckless playboy son (Vincent Price). The ne’er-do-well scion cruelly dangles the CEO job in front of the company’s top talent, plunging them into a ruthless competition. Whoever solves the Lipstick Killer Murders will win the prize, and plenty of boardroom backstabbing ensues.
Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase, brings electricity to the 1977 neo-noir The American Friend, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Highsmith, of course, wrote the source material for Strangers on a Train along with a series of novels centered on the charming but amoral sociopath Tom Ripley; her gimlet-eyed view of human nature was perfectly suited for noir.
German director Wim Wenders had yet to direct his art house hit Wings of Desire, his American debut Hammett or his masterpiece Paris, Texas. He had directed seven European features when he traveled to ask Highsmith in person for filming rights to a Ripley story.
In The American Friend, Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a craftsman who makes frames for paintings; he dabbles in the shady world of art fraud, making antique-appearing frames for art forgeries. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) entangles him in something far more consequential – a murder-for-hire.
As befits a neo-noir, Zimmermann finds himself amid a pack of underworld figures, all set to double-cross each other with lethal finality. In very sly casting by Wenders, all the criminals are played by movie directors: Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Gérard Blain, Rudolf Schündler, Jean Eustache. Nick Ray is especially dissolute-looking with his rakish eye-patch. Sam Fuller, in his mid-60s, insisted on performing his own stunt, with a camera attached to his body on a dramatic fall.
Bruno Ganz in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
As the murder scheme unfolds, there is a tense and thrilling set piece on a train, worthy of The Narrow Margin. Other set pieces include a white-knuckle break-in and the ambush of an ambulance.
Here’s one singular sequence. After a meeting with Ray, Hopper walks away from the camera along an elevated highway. Then Hopper is shown, still on the highway, in long shot from what turns out to be Fuller’s apartment, where Fuller interrupts the filming of a skin flick to deny having a guy shot on the Paris Metro. Then we see Hopper on an airplane, and then Ganz on a train. Finally, Ganz returns to a seedy neighborhood by the docks. It’s excellent story-telling – at once economical and showy and ultra-noirish .
Dennis Hopper and Nick Ray in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
Cinematographer Robby Müller pioneered use of fluorescent lighting in The American Friend. The nighttime interiors have a queasy eeriness that matches the story perfectly. Müller, who died in 2018, was endlessly groundbreaking. He made the vast spaces of the Texas Big Bend country iconic in Paris, Texas. He was also responsible for the one-way mirror effect in Paris, Texas’ pivotal peepshow scene. For better or worse, he jerked the handheld camera in Breaking the Waves, spawning a legion of lesser copycats. Müller gave a unique look to indie movies from Repo Man to Ghost Dog; The Way of the Samurai.
Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIENDDennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
The American Friend was shot in 1977, in the midst of Dennis Hopper’s tumultuous drug abuse phase. He had just directed his notorious Lost Film The Last Movie and arrived in Europe from the Philippines set of Apocalypse Now!, where he was famously drug-addled and out of control. After getting Hopper’s substance abuse distilled down to only one or two drugs of choice, Wenders gave Hopper carte blanche to take chances in his performance, The American Friend being the only movie Tom Ridley in a cowboy hat. It paid off in a brilliant scene in which Hopper lies on a pool table, snapping selfies with a Polaroid camera; it’s a brilliant imagining of a sociopath in solitary, with no one to manipulate. John Malkovich, Matt Damon and even Alain Delon have played some version of Tom Ripley. Hopper’s is as menacing as any Ripley, and – by a long shot the most tormented. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, here is Wenders on Hopper.
The American Friend is not a great movie. Zimmermann is motivated by a grave health issue, but too much screen time is wasted on that element, causing the movie to drag in spots. Movie auctions come with built-in excitement, but The American Friend’s art auction is pretty ordinary. And, other than Fuller, Ray and Blain, the directors are not that good as actors.
Still, the unpredictability in the high wire Dennis Hopper performance, the look of the film and the action set pieces warrant a look.
The American Friend can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. The late great FilmStruck offered some exceptional features, including a 38-minute interview with Wenders (excerpted above).
DECEPTIVE PRACTICE: THE MYSTERIES AMD MENTORS OF RICKY JAY
Ricky Jay, the great magician, magic historian and collector, has died at age 72 after also making his mark in cinema. Jay appeared in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and a passel of David Mamet films, including the masterpiece House of Games. You can also find video of his performance Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.
Jay’s development as a magician is traced in the documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, which explores the fascinating history of 20th century American magic. We get to see performances by Jay and his mentors, with comments by Jay himself. Ricky Jay’s mysteries were the secrets of 1) his illusions and 2) his family – both unrevealed. Whether expansive about his mentors and his passion for magic, or tight-mouthed about his relationship with his parents, Jay was a fascinating character.
Because the audience gets to see lots of amazing magic, Deceptive Practice is attractive as a performance film. But Jay was an unsurpassed raconteur, one of my all-time favorites, and when he held forth, it was as entertaining as any of his illusions.
I was fortunate to see Deceptive Practice at the San Francisco International Film Festival sitting amongst a bunch of real magicians. Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay is available on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Seek out two of the best 5 movies of 2018 – Roma and Shoplifters.
OUT NOW
Romais an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Will win multiple Oscars.
Shoplifters won the Palm d’Or at Cannes. This is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems.
The sci fi coming of age adventure Prospecthas a one week run in the Bay Area at San Jose’s 3Below and is well worth seeking out..
The masterful documentary Monrovia, Indiana is a fascinating movie about a boring subject.
The Great Buster: A Celebrationis Peter Bogdanovich’s biodoc of the comic genius Buster Keaton, filling in what we need to know of Keaton’s life and body of work.
Just in case you haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet – Lady Gaga illuminates Bradley Cooper’s triumphant A Star Is Born. Don’t bring a hankie – bring a whole friggin’ box of Kleenex.
What They Had is an authentic and well-crafted dramatic four-hander with Hilary Swank, Michael Shannon, Blythe Danner and Robert Forster.
The Outlaw King, with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, exists for those who need a dose of medieval slaughter and a spunky queen, but there’s not enough there for the rest of us.
Skip First Man – a boring movie about a fascinating subject.
ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the fine Lynne Shelton drama Outside In, with its stunning performance by Edie Falco. It can be streamed on Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
Tomorrow, Turner Class Movies will air two of the most cynical movies about showbiz. First, there’s Robert Altman’s superb 1992 satire of Hollywood, The Player. Wickedly funny, it features a stellar cast: Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Lyle Lovett, Dean Stockwell, Whoopi Goldberg, Richard E. Grant, Vincent D’Onofrio, Peter Gallagher, Sydney Pollack and Dina Merrill.
And then we have one of the greatest movies of all time – All About Eve (1950). Bette Davis plays the middle-aging Broadway superstar Margot Channing, who fears losing her popularity with age. Who can eclipse her in the dog eat dog world of show biz? George Sanders is wonderful as the cynical critic Addison DeWitt, whose bimbo de jour is played by Marilyn Monroe. All About Eve was nominated for fourteen Oscars and won six.
ALL ABOUT EVE: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”
Ando Sakura, Sasaki Miyu, Jyo Kairi, Lily Franky, Matsuoka Mayu and Kiki Kirin in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Shoplifters is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems. Everyone in this contemporary Japanese family – dad, mom, teen girl and even grandma – has some shady job or outright scam. The dad has taught the 10-year-old boy to become a skilled shoplifter and tells him that he isn’t sent to school because he’s too smart. The dad and son rescue a lost and neglected four-year-old girl from a harsh winter night; the family decides to adopt her into the family. Of course, we wonder if the little girl’s biological parents will report her missing and whether the authorities will track her down.
Other than informally adding a child, not much seems to happen as the family goes on with its daily life – “work”, “shopping”, meal prep, bedtime and the rest, even a beach excursion. These lovable scoundrels are a hoot, and Shoplifters is very funny.
Writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda reveals – character by character – how each came into the family. Eventually that becomes critically important to the family’s survival – and leads to an emotionally powerful ending. The closest families are chosen by each other.
Lily Franky and Jyo Kairi in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Shoplifters features a magnificent performance by Sakura Andô as the family’s mother figure – pretty understated until she gets to a knock-your-socks-off seduction scene. Her two jailhouse interviews at the end of the film are heartbreaking.
Jyo Kairi, with one of the best child performances of the year, is also superb as the boy.
Shoplifters just won the Palm d’Or, the top award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Koreeda is known for the 1995 art house hit Maborosi, one of the best movies of 2008, Still Walking and this year’s The Third Murder. I saw Shoplifters in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
The fine Lynn Shelton drama Outside In begins when a man (Jay Duplass of Transparent) returns to his small town community after 20 years in prison. Having been incarcerated since he was a teenager, he’s a bit emotionally stunted; he was a good kid who is now trying to be a good man. He tries to negotiate his way among his not-so-supportive family, some former friends who share a secret and suspicious townspeople.
He’s free only because of a persistent campaign for justice by one of his high school teachers (Edie Falco). The case has been an obsession for the teacher, much to annoyance of her blue-collar husband. Now that the campaign has ended, the teacher must fill that vacuum with another passion.
There isn’t much passion in her marriage. Shelton brilliantly depicts a husband who has expectations of their relationship and their future – he just doesn’t communicate them to his wife, or check to see if those expectations are shared. He’s not a terrible person, and the relationship isn’t abusive – it’s just lapsed into staleness.
The freed convict and the teacher are comforted by each other. There are several ways that this story could go, several of them trite. Let’s just say that Shelton takes us in some unpredictable directions, while maintaining authenticity.
Outside In is a story of self-discovery. The teacher must assess what will make her happy and make some hard choices. In a tour de force, Falco takes us through her confusion, dissatisfaction, longing, passion and, finally, determination.
Kaitlin Dever (Justified) is also excellent as the teacher’s teen daughter. Outside In is an acting showcase for Falco, Duplass and Dever. Falco’s performance, however, is stunning.
I saw Outside In before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. It can be streamed on Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Yalitza Aparicio (second from left) and Marina de Tavira (center) in ROMA
In the powerful and sublimely beautiful Roma, Cleo is the cheerful and ever-on-duty domestic servant in the Mexico City home of Sofia, her doctor husband, their four kids and Sofia’s mother. Sofia’s upper middle class family are light-skinned gueros and Cleo is indigenous. Sofia’s husband leaves her, and she tries to hold her household and her emotions together without letting on to the kids. Sofia and Cleo’s relationship changes and is forged closer when each faces a personal crisis.
That distillation of the story doesn’t begin to capture the profound depth of Roma. Despite their differences in race and class, Cleo and Sofia are in the same situation – facing life’s travails and the responsibilities of family without any help. They are isolated and they must find ways to endure.
Cleo (Yaritza Aparicio) encourages and nurtures the imagination of the youngest child, Pepe. She is playful and adored by the children. This is Aparicio’s first acting gig; she was chosen from among 3000 candidates for the role. Sofia, who is balancing on a knife-edge throughout the story, is played by veteran actress Marina de Tavira, who found Sofia’s story to be the same as her own mother’s. These are two wonderfully authentic performances.
Roma is written, directed and edited by master filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). This may be his masterpiece. Cuarón won two Oscars For Gravity, in which he conveyed the terrible and unforgiving enormity of outer space. In Children of Men, he created one of the longest, most intricate and compelling action shots in cinema history.
Shot in glorious black and white, Roma is packed with amazing set pieces, both with long static shots and even longer tracking shots. There’s a nighttime tracking shot that follows Cleo through several blocks of a bustling Mexico City downtown street. In another extended single, dolly shot, the camera follows characters from the beach into the surf, beyond the surf break and then back to shore.
Emergencies in the surf of a beach resort and in a hospital are among the most harrowing movie scenes that I’ve seen this year – even more intense than climactic scenes in thrillers.
As heartbreaking as Roma can get, there’s a great deal of humor here. Much is centered on the family dog and his massive production of excrement. There’s also the repeated ordeal of an oversized Ford Galaxy inching its way into an undersized car park. A rural hacienda contains some very unusual wall decorations. And there’s an unexpected and remarkably inappropriate naked martial arts performance.
According to those who would know, Roma is an evocative time capsule of Mexico City at the beginning of the 1970s.
The characters of the mom and the domestic, along with the events – the riot, the forest fire, the earthquake, etc. – are recreated from Cuarón’s most vivid and enduring memories of his own childhood. It’s a deeply personal and individual story, but one which is universal – that of women carrying on without the support of (and even despite) the men in their lives.
I saw Roma at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October at a screening with Aparicio, de Tavira and producers Gabriella Rodriguez and Jonathan King. Cuarón shot the film in sequence over 108 days and only showed the cast the script one day at a time, directing them to “surrender” to the story. Rodriguez confirmed that the family sees Marooned at the movie in a nod to Gravity.
Roma takes its title from the family’s neighborhood in Mexico City.
Roma will be released in New York, LA and Mexico City theaters this weekend and will open more widely on November 29. Having been financed by Netflix, it will stream to Netflix subscribers on December 14. This is one of the year’s very best films, and it will receive multiple Oscar nominations.
Viola Davis in WIDOWS. Photo Credit: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.
This week I’m featuring an absolute MUST for Silicon Valley film lovers, Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. The Club is wrapping up its 22nd season this weekend and looking forward to 2019. A 2019 Club membership can also be a treasured Holiday gift.
And I’ll be trying to figure out how, despite ten solid days of family and job commitments, I can see three of the most promising movies of the year: Green Book, Widows and Burning.
OUT NOW
The sci fi coming of age adventure Prospecthas a one week run in the Bay Area at San Jose’s 3Below and is well worth seeking out..
The masterful documentary Monrovia, Indiana is a fascinating movie about a boring subject.
The Great Buster: A Celebrationis Peter Bogdanovich’s biodoc of the comic genius Buster Keaton, filling in what we need to know of Keaton’s life and body of work.
Just in case you haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet – Lady Gaga illuminates Bradley Cooper’s triumphant A Star Is Born. Don’t bring a hankie – bring a whole friggin’ box of Kleenex.
What They Had is an authentic and well-crafted dramatic four-hander with Hilary Swank, Michael Shannon, Blythe Danner and Robert Forster.
The Outlaw King, with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, exists for those who need a dose of medieval slaughter and a spunky queen, but there’s not enough there for the rest of us.
Skip First Man – a boring movie about a fascinating subject.
ON VIDEO
My stream of the week is the searing French thriller Custody, in which writer-director Xavier Legrand paints the most elemental and realistic depiction of domestic violence that I’ve seen. Custody won Legrand the Silver Lion (Best Director) at the Venice film festival. It can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
On November 20, Turner Classic Movies presents what I considered the very best movie of 1996, Secrets & Lies. Written and directed by Mike Leigh (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, Another Year), this is Leigh’s masterpiece.
Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is an accomplished young British woman who has been raised by middle-class adoptive parents. She decides to track down her birth mother, who turns out to be the working class hot mess Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). This triggers Cynthia’s emotional damage from giving up baby Hortense, her panic at explaining this to her family – with the complicating factor that Hortense is Black. All kinds of family complications ensue. Cynthia’s underachieving daughter (Claire Rushbrook) is not at all comfortable with the emergence of an over-achieving sibling. Cynthia’s sister-in-law (Penelope Logan) faces this through her own child-related anguish. And Cynthia’s brother (Timothy Spall), who has clawed his way to respectability, has to juggle these developments.
There’s a searing emotional authenticity to Secrets & Lies, but there’s plenty of humor, too. (The montage of the brother’s portrait photography clients is hilarious.)
Blethyn’s fine performance is the showiest, but this is the movie where I recognized the greatness of Timothy Spall. Secrets & Lies, Leigh, Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste were all nominated for Academy Awards, with Secrets & Lies and Fargo losing the Best Picture Oscar to The English Patient (only because The English Patient was far, far more pretentious), This is a film of uncommon humanity.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethyn in SECRETS & LIES
